September 30, 2007

Poromechanics

The following text is a short excerpt from the lengthy paper discussed at the seminar on porous earth and subsurface politics. The lecture took place at Goldsmiths University of London and was organized by Eyal Weizman at the department of visual cultures. Eyal Weizman has recently published his work Hollow Land, a tour de force on militarization of geodynamics and space which I will later talk about at length.

During the talk, the following section was elaborated by examples on the logic of poromechanical distribution of consistencies and the employment of this logic in locating ancient necropolises, underground facilities and decoding steganographic texts or works of hidden writing. For keeping the text short and suitable for one post, I have skipped the examples used in this section.

Deleuze and Guattari’s holey space can be addressed both as an event and entity. As an event it demarcates the limitropic degeneration of a whole which never effectuates full annihilation or complete effacement (hence the nomenclature ( )hole complex) and for this reason it perpetuates a poromechanical decay whose incessant dynamism is maintained by differentiation between solid and void. As an entity, the holey space is characterized by its anomalous distribution of consistencies through the poromechanical space.

The politics of the holey space is defiant toward the existing models of harvesting power, manipulating and analyzing events on the surface. For the world order, inconsistent events around the world are failures or setbacks since they resist the contemporary dominant political models. According to the politics of poromechanical earth, however, inconsistencies, regional disparities and insidious nonuniformities across the globe constitute the body of the ultimate politics. The emergence of two entities (political formation, military, economic, etc.) from two different locations on the ground is inconsistent, but according to the logic of ( )hole complex they are terminally inter-connected and consistent. In terms of emergence, consistency or connectivity should not be measured by the ground or the body of solid as a whole but according to a degenerate model of whole and the poromechanical entity.

The asymmetry between ground’s consistency and the consistency of poromechanical entities or porous earth has long been formulated by military and political practitioners as an archeological law – for every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency. The law of subterranean cause in archaeology bears a striking resemblance to Freud’s suggestion that for every psychosomatic breakdown, there is a Complex (an anomalous convolution and knottedness) beneath consciousness. The reason for this similarity lies in the fact that according to both archeology and Freudian psychoanalysis, the line of emergence (the worm-function) travels according to the resistivity against emergence, the dynamism of emergence and degree of porosity. The course of emergence in any medium is identical to the formation of that medium; the more agitated the line of emergence becomes, the more convoluted and complex the host medium will be. In terms of poromechanics and ( )hole complex, the superficial orientation of both archaeology and Freudian psychoanalysis are too complex – immersed in multiplex dynamics of surfaces and their interactions with emergence – to be fathomed. The myths of obtuse flatness or totalitarianism attributed to Freudian psychoanalysis by postmodernist rivals are in most cases the symptoms of misunderstanding the problem of surfaces and emergence as related to the lacunae of consciousness. The superficial (as related to visible, circumferential and grounded surfaces) entities of Freudian theories only come into existence as products of unbound activities in emergence, or more accurately, the convoluted and porous formations through which emergence takes place. In the domain of emergence, every surface – whether of constraining ground or porosities – belongs to and is mobilized by the poromechanics of ( )hole complex. And in ( )hole complex, depth exists as the ambiguity or the gradient between inner and outer, solid and void, one and zero; or in other words, as a third scale or a dynamically balancing, intermediary agency which operates against the unitary or binary logics of inner and outer, vigor and silence, inclusion and exclusion. Holes spontaneously develop a ternary logic.

For both archaeology and Freudian psychoanalysis, the process of emergence and its immediate connection with formation and dynamism of surfaces, namely, ( )hole complex inevitably coincides with paranoia. For every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency; here is an overlap between two consistencies. One is the consistency according to the dynamic surfaces of holey space or simply cavities, and the other is the consistency between cavities surfaces (holes) and the circumferential surface of the solid (ground or visible surface). For every cause with a vertical distribution, there is a cause with a horizontal or slanted distribution, or vice versa. The effect is simultaneously produced by two causes with two different logics. For being registered on the circumferential surface or the ground, the schizoid structure or consistency of ( )hole complex should be transmitted to the solid body where it has to be consolidated. Anomalies on the ground-surface are imminent to the two planes of schizophrenia and paranoia. According to the archeological law of contemporary military doctrines and Freudian psychoanalysis, for every inconsistency or anomaly on the ground, there is a schizoid consistency; to reach the schizoid consistency, a paranoid consistency or plane of paranoia must be traversed. (See Fig. 13)

Fig. 13 The two planes of schizophrenia and paranoia: subterranean consistency and superficial inconsistency

The militarization of the contemporary world both in its politics and concrete approaches is architecturally, visually and psychologically paradoxical (too paranoid to be schizoid and too schizoid to be paranoid); since its agencies – as of in War on Terror – are shifting from the logic of grounded earth to the poromechanical earth and the logic of hole agencies. Although making examples restricts the vastness of militarization in respect to the poromechanics of war and archeology as the science of military innovation in the twenty-first century, but enumerating one or two cases might increase lucidity.

1. In countries with detailed homeland security protocols or relatively high level of alertness, where ground or aerial operations as of hostile, subversive or stealth activities cannot be conducted, the emergence of intricate poromechanical entities is escalated and cannot be avoided. In such countries, the distribution of illegal immigrants or smuggled products such as drugs and weapons around the border regions follows not patterns of activities on the surface but the formation and the architecture of nested holeyness beneath the ground. Activities or lines of movement (tactics) are not separate from the architecture of such ( )hole complexes. According to military experts or urban planners with military educations, criminal and hostile activities can no longer be explained, analyzed or traced on land, aerial and water levels. These activities only conform to (paranoically that is) structures of vast underground vermiculate spaces and their constantly displacing lines of emergence (schizoid formations of surfaces). The distribution, escalation and diffusion of complicities is identical to different aspects of hole trafficking. For military experts, the terror market is nothing but that of porosities of earth. Cross-border wormholes under the US-Mexico border, tunnels under Gaza-Egypt and all other examples of hole trafficking confound the polarities of surface globalization and its politico-military facets. Economic and power formations for clandestine Guerilla-states, anti-State movements and ambiguously Imperialist states configure themselves on poromechanics of war.

2. The Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan mainly escalated by coalition forces (especially US forces to the point of using BLU-82 bombs and a potential nuclear bunker buster strike) based on the collected information about vast underground facilities and terror networks in Tora Bora Mountains. US and British forces initiated a surgical strike comprised of sophisticated tactics, innovative command and control and inventive use of military implements and weapons. Tactics and the entire logic of military progression in Tora Bora were formulated precisely in order to match the mountains, and give an appropriate military response to the holey architecture of terror compounds. In short, the military formation of the entire battle was determined based on the supposed tortuousness of the holey complex within the mountains, and then techniques and solutions for neutralizing and clearing them. The complexity of movements or formative dynamics belonging to US and British forces was compatible and in counter-geographical correspondence to the nested complexity of holes, tunnels and underground chambers. The Battle of Tora Bora was actualized based on the complexity of Tora Bora sub-surface facilities but in the absence of actual holes and vermiculate complexities. Bound to the paranoid logical line in holey complexes (from the ground to the cavity) and unbound by a nonexisting schizoid architecture of nested holes, coalition forces led by United States developed the first full-fledged example of Cappadocian Complex. Adhering to the logic that wherever hostile activities and threats are inconsistent and asymmetrical, there is an underground cause of nested holeyness; and consequently one must formulate formations to counteract these convoluted and subterranean architectures is the heart of Cappadocian Complex. Where in Tora Bora, there was no sub-surface nexus or complex, in Cappadocia beneath every surface and in every mountain or hill there is a multiplex of holes, lairs and passageways, an elusive machine digging in and out.

Poromechanics is simultaneously construed by the vector of schizophrenia and the vector of paranoia. For contemporary world politics, militarization is inevitably determined by the differentiation between these two vectors.